I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left • Hacker News Board

Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#401

Post by cryo32 » Sun, May 10, 2026, 7:07 PM UTC

Galanwe wrote: post #324

These arguments against AWS are boring. 99% of the negative comments are along the line of "so i have a dead simple product, I dont know anything about AWS, I logged in and it was super complicated and it seemed pricey". Well guess what, if you have a CRUD website and 100 users you're just not the target. Move on. Some days ago I wanted to sketch a 3D model of my TV remote. I opened blender and what a mess of complic…

Nope. We have an incredibly complicated product, a bunch of actual experts and paid up high level enterprise support.

It is about 8x more expensive to run it on AWS than it was on actual hardware. And that's using their reference architecture and designs. And the sprawling nature of AWS services and uptake makes it pretty damn hard to get out. We are slowly and quietly migrating everyting to IaaS / kubernetes so we can get it out again. Just moving to kubernetes and packing stuff tight on EKS and thus kubernetes has shaved 30% of our costs off already.

We were sold a lie and fell for it hook, line and sinker.

Edit: also fuck things like Lambda. It's literally the most horrible experience that the universe can muster. Moved most of our lambdas to simple boring http services on top of Go and just leave 20 instances running. Just not having to deal with CloudWatch saved us more money than Lambda could have.

Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#402

Post by mips_avatar » Sun, May 10, 2026, 7:15 PM UTC

aljgz wrote: post #49

Years ago, I joined a company, took over a dev team and was asked to launch the product in 3 months. They were using AWS, so I logged in the account to add a few more machines. Right there, in front of my eyes, were the signs of an adversarial, abusive relationship. The UI to fire up a new machine did not show me the price. I had to look up the price in another table that did not have the specs. I had to have the two…

They have to do that because their pricing is bad. Like if you want to run a custom vector db you can run it 20x cheaper on hetzner than aws.

Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#403

Post by AIorNot » Sun, May 10, 2026, 7:21 PM UTC

Yup -like the honesty

Why don't cloud services have reviews like amazon products.- I’m so tired of enterprise sales speak in corporate docs- just cut the BS and do straight talk

If you haven’t used a service you shouldn’t have to search reddit for dev experience on it

Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#404

Post by viccis » Sun, May 10, 2026, 7:22 PM UTC

rembal wrote: post #42

+1 on the IAM over engineering, though to AWS credit, I suspect it was evolved rather than design, and that's what you get when evolution has to maintain some level of backward compatibility (think humans still having to be able to lay eggs). Another thing that happens occasionally for saas companies is AWS creating a copy of their product in a bit sus way - but it's not a technical problem, it's a business model pro…

And god help you if you want to use one of their many competing data engineering tools, all of which will be duct taped onto Glue and require not just IAM but also another layer of RBAC on top of IAM. Like you said with IAM, I think it just slowly evolved into the mess it is today, but it's rough. Trying to just run a simple Spark query using an S3 Table Bucket was enough to remind me why Snowflake and Databricks are printing money by making it a more user friendly experience.

Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#405

Post by viccis » Sun, May 10, 2026, 7:25 PM UTC

torginus wrote: post #277

Imo lambdas are super cool, and the best way to have a no-headache fast-iteration time deployment service. What most people realize, that you don't have to go microservice or fragment your code to a billion little repos, you could take a standard webserver, and move it to lambda, as long as you don't expect requests to be able to share on-server state.

I agree. Web service hosted on Lambda that, for long running async tasks, uses FIFO SQS (optionally by way of FIFO SNS) connected to the task runner Lambda. Easy. It's not hard to deploy like OP claims. Build a Docker image, toss it in ECR, and use AWS CDK to do infra. Done.

Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#406

Post by baobabKoodaa » Sun, May 10, 2026, 7:26 PM UTC

aorloff wrote: post #237

themgt wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congrats, your raw EC2-hosted 500MB WebGL experimental card game went to the HN Front Page! You now owe AWS $30k in egress costs.

Well this is the dream right ? You build something, well enough that it can handle the traffic, and people come, and it does. Welcome to the gaming industry

No, it is not the dream. The same thing on Hetzner or Linode would cost $30 instead of $30k.

Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#407

Post by baobabKoodaa » Sun, May 10, 2026, 7:27 PM UTC

christophilus wrote: post #18

ChrisBland wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I miss heroku dearly. somewhere at Salesforce there is an exec who killed the product and shifted it to enterprise and is now looking at the vibe coding revolution seeing their opportunity missed.

Render has been excellent replacement, in my experience.

Last time I tried render, it did not allow me to spin up 1 instance of my web app, so I'm never going back. (To clarify: Render would always spin up a minimum of 2 instances.)

Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#408

Post by baobabKoodaa » Sun, May 10, 2026, 7:28 PM UTC

maccard wrote: post #31

ChrisBland wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I miss heroku dearly. somewhere at Salesforce there is an exec who killed the product and shifted it to enterprise and is now looking at the vibe coding revolution seeing their opportunity missed.

Digital ocean is the answer. You give it a container and off you go.

Not sure how Digital Ocean is comparable to what Heroku used to be.

Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#409

Post by baobabKoodaa » Sun, May 10, 2026, 7:29 PM UTC

cpursley wrote: post #20

ChrisBland wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I miss heroku dearly. somewhere at Salesforce there is an exec who killed the product and shifted it to enterprise and is now looking at the vibe coding revolution seeing their opportunity missed.

Fly and Render are what heroku would be if they didn’t stop innovating. And neon db for Postgres.

Fly is unreliable. Render does not allow you to spin up 1 instance of an app.

Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#410

Post by zrobotics » Sun, May 10, 2026, 7:32 PM UTC

clickety_clack wrote: post #363

aljgz wrote: post #49

Years ago, I joined a company, took over a dev team and was asked to launch the product in 3 months. They were using AWS, so I logged in the account to add a few more machines. Right there, in front of my eyes, were the signs of an adversarial, abusive relationship. The UI to fire up a new machine did not show me the price. I had to look up the price in another table that did not have the specs. I had to have the two…

People don’t seem to realize how simple pricing can be made for the user. I switched to digital ocean too, and it’s great. I think people think it’s not really engineering if it’s not complicated, so they stick with these insane AWS/GCP/Azure setups. But it’s not 2012 anymore, this stuff has been figured out and commoditized, and managing your cloud setup should be “easy” for 99% of products. Edit: and when I say “99…

Plus, I've never understood the argument that cloud is better because you don't need to deal with the complexity of managing a server. Yes, it's a very deep topic and there's a lot of nuances to managing a Linux box serving web content, but we've been doing that for decades and there is tons of information and tooling available.

Every time I've needed to manage something on AWS I've been shocked at just how over wrought the whole system is. There's tons of As-specific terminology for everything, and lots of stuff is tremendously complicated to manage. I can definitely understand why companies need to hire people who are experts in AWS specifically, it's complicated enough to justify that. However, for me personally I'd rather learn more traditional sysadmin systems. The skills are more evergreen, and I'd rather spend my time learning open systems than one tech giant's specific system.

About 6 months ago I needed to migrate some of our systems from DigitalOcean to Hetzner. It was a 2 day process that was very painless. The only complicated bit was managing the DNS switchover with zero downtime. If we were moving those same 3 components from AWS to GCP or Azure, it would have involved needing to rearchitect and rewrite a lot of software.